I should add that whenever we change the characteristics of an organism, we change how it interacts with its environment, we run the risk of causing severe environmental problems, as these organisms can reproduce out of control and there is no mechanism to keep it in check. It happens all the time when exotic species are transported to hawaii or australia, where they have no natural predators, when they are introduced to these environments they are quite out of place and can destroy local species. These microbes could have other effects, being genitically engineered, which are heard to predict.Perhaps they will get into rivers and choke out other species. Perhaps they are toxic to other organisms that might consume them. Etc, etc.
This sounds great, but a note of caution is needed. If they have developed a microbe that basically can eat through any organic material, what they perhaps have invented is a new pathogenic superbug. Think about it, if this can eat through organic material as such, what would happen if it got loose somehow and got into a field of crops, could this start eating away and destroying crops? Have you engineered a new super agricultural pest? This could happen completely unintentionally, not to mention the potential for intentional weaponisation.
Ridiculous. It takes energy to do it, and that has to come from somewhere. You end up burning fossil fuels to make hydrogen, and wasting more energy than burning fossul fuels directly. If it really did allow you to save energy, the car manufacturers would be all over it and environmentalists would be demanding this to be a standard feature in all cars. I mean, getting gas mileage high is a top priority and there is all kinds of research and efforts to make this happen. Car manufacturers would have a big selling point with higher mileage, consumers would flock to it. So why dont these so called inventors licence their technologies to car manufacturers. Because it doesnt work and car manufacturers have actual trained engineers who can see through scam artist crap.
So if it works so great, why arent you still doing it. I have to remain skeptical of fantastic claims like this as well. If this is so, and you can boost up mileage just by adding water to gas, why isnt everyone doing it? It would be a no brainer. Its like all of these miracalous technologies that by retrofitting your car with some device that generates hydrogen from electrolysis and injects it into the fuel, you are supposed to get 80 mpg or some ridiculous thing. You have people selling do it yourself kits for this. if the inventors really did have this, they could make a load of money to sell licences to car manufacturers. They would be billionaries. SO why dont they? Because its not real, its a scam, and any car manufacturer or engine manufacturer would find that out. The reason they only use kits is they cant be held liable when it doesnt work, they can just say the user didnt do something right. They are of course, all get rich quick scams, taking advantage of peoples gullability.
While this may sound like a nice adventure, going into space, if I had a billion, its the last thing I would ever want to do, because it is so risky. There are a million things that can go wrong, space flight has a high rate of occurance of accidents, when you are in orbit, as well, there is not much anyone on ground can do to help you when you get into trouble. So certainly, it is a huge gamble, and not one I would be comfortable with.
This law is a blatant violation of free speech and the first amendment. While I do not agree with "cyberbullying", we are talking about speech here rather than an actual physical act of violence. As well, it is much eisier to ignore verbal abuse on the internet, with block lists, or simply minimising the window, that a law is truly unnecessary. There are a class of crimes called stalking, but on the internet medium these can be fairly easily combated with the ignore lisr etc.
We should not have to live in fear of everything we say perhaps being misconstrued in some wa. That is the kind of society which this will lead to, where people live in fear basically of saying anything.
Usage based pricing is a horrible idea and not much better than discriminatory bandwidth throttling of certain sites. I would much rather have a bandwidth cap which applies to all data regardless of which site than either selective throttling or usage based pricing. ISPs want to advertise far more bandwidth they can offer, in a deceptive practice, and and then compensate for this deceptive advertising with selective throttling and usage based pricing. Either they should be able to provide the bandwidth they advertise or should not advertise it. I would rather see minimum per user bandwidth guarantees, which users would be able to reach, and which can be provided to all users, and then depending on network conditions, users may have additional bandwidth avialable depending on network load (which can be advertised as a maximum rate, during low use periods the amount of bandwidth per user increases). This keeps single users from saturating the network while maintaining flat pricing.
Dennis Kucinich objected to these measures too. The good thing about Kucinich is you get all of Ron Pauls concern about civil liberties and opposition to intrusive police state tactics, without is fanatical ideas about cutting off foreign civilian aid and emergency assistance programs, that you know, keeps children here and in other countries from starving to death.
I think you hit the nail on the head. That is exactly what they want to do. The elites have for so long controlled the media and have been in the exclusive position to be able to propogandise the public and control inforation flow. Since the development of the internet, we have seen for the first time true freedom of speech for the masses, where we dont only have it on paper, but people are actually able to use it without having a lot of money and resources. Previously, media was easy control , and it by definition had to be large corporations in order to reach large numbers of people. Now anyone can publish information that can be accessed by anyone else. This terrifies them, since their goal, being power hungry and really seeing the planet as something to be controlled rather than a place where people can control themselves and live in freedom. They have for years trying to find ways to shut down the internet and control it.
I say nothing should be censored. ISPs are a common carrier and should be prohibited from surveillance and as well as preventing from censoring anything they are carrying, just as the postal service cannot open your letters and censor them. This does not mean we give the power to the government corporations or to anyone else as to what can be censored, we need to deny the government and corporations the right to censor anything.
I would like to clarify my message a bit. When I said rich elite I was referring to certain wealthy or powerful corporations and individuals who want to control everything. I do not mean to say all wealthy are like that, some do have good intentions and have tried to do positive things, one example is Google and their attempts to keep the 700 Mhz spectrum open.
We need to have a government that that respects the freedoms and rights of everyone, not disporportionally that of some rather than others. Obama will make our priorities once again making this country better for everyone, investing in its infrastructure, in science and education, and so on, rather than getting our resources tied up in oil wars that benefit of a few wealthy corporate sponsors of Bush. We need to fund science and education so we can have the capability to develop renewable and clean sources of energy to power the future. Drilling for oil isnt the long term solution to that, and is so environmentally harmful, along with oil, we need to stop using it as quickly as possible and find a clean green source of abundant energy. This is essential for maintaining our computer tech inertia which is also energy dependant. Obama seems when it comes to energy issues and the internet seems to have a good understanding of what we need to do and should not do.
Net Neutrality is very important and critical to preserving a free and open internet and we do badly need to make this a part of law. Barack Obama is more likely to do this. I am definitely a Obama supporter not only due to this but due to a wide spectrum of other issues as well.
The claims made by telcos are mostly lies and deception. The telcos always have been able to tier service based on overall speed, what they have not been allowed to do is effectively censor content by slowing down some sites or blocking access to them. They dont need any capability to censor content or to discriminate against certain content. The corporations agenda is simply a vieled attempt to control information flow over the internet and to block access to things they dont like and dont agree with.
Measures lesser than Net Nuetrality wont be enough to address this. Blocking access or making access more difficult to certain content is innately bad and has no place on what should be an open and democratic form of communication where everyone has equal opportunity to be heard, where things are not biased towards corporations and their content. There is no way to make discriminating against content an acceptable practice or tilting it in favour of powerful corporate interests.
It is little different from what is being done in china, It is different in name only, here we have corporations do the censorship, In china it is government, The US has a composite government consisting of corporations and the republican government which they elect and which represents their interests. The corporations are the republican constituents. When you here a republican talk about their constituents, they are usually referring to the wealthy corporate donors who got them elected and paid for their campaigns. Democrats while not always perfect are certainly have a greater propensity to represent the people and do what is in the best interests of the general population rather than of big corporations.
We complain about what China has done in censoring the internet however we would have the same situation here unless we do something to bolster the internet as a free and open medium where everyone which is open to everyone with no discrimination. The same sort of mentality and insidious objective behinds Chinas censorship and the desire of corporations to censor the internet springs from the same mindset. The corporations have been able to control the flow of information for so long, they have had a monopoly on the media and were the gatekeepers, they could control what people could see and hear and it was very difficult to reach a large number of people, very expensive, though traditional mediums, so it excluded many from being able to express their views. the internet is a democratic form of communication, it is the first time we have had anything approaching true positive free speech where anyone could broadcast their views to anyone else and everyone is on an equal footing, no matter if you are poor or are a millionaire. And if a you re a rich megalomaniac you just cant have a situation where the little people can express themselves and actually make their voice heard to millions, and where there is nothing you can do to stop this and where they basically are on an equally footing, yhou no longer have your built in advantage of traditional media which allows you to more effectively distribute your views. Thje rich hate this because they have been so long accustomed to setting the agenda and manipulating society for their own benefit. So the openness and democracy of the net scared them because they are losing power and the internet has moved us more in the direction of a democratic society, so they are now trying to find a way to desperately shut it down and turn it into some sort of corporate controlled outlet one way sort of medium just like television is, where only the corporations have any rights to express themselves and everyone else is a mindless consumer who pays their monthly satellite subscription bill to be brainwashed by c
I am deeply disturbed that the US government is censoring information. This shows that the US government is now operating in total defiance of the US constitution and of human rights, along with the fact it is now engaging in torture of prisoners and indefinite detainments without trail and charges and so on. No government should be allowed to censor information or violate human rights in other ways. We should not allow a government to decide what people can and cant look at. Once we allow this, there is little stop this from getting more and more unreasonable. One minute it could be terrorist videos, another minute it could be videos say uncovering toxic pollution of the environment by a company (this, according to the increasingly vague definition of terrorism, I am sure could eventually be called a terrorist act because it threatens corporate profits and tries to alert the public so they will demand the government stop the pollution).
Free speech is a very important right and why the drafters of the US constitution did not include any provision for it to be suspended. This is because it is difficult to define what is bad law or a good law in a constitution. The founders understood that if there are unjust laws in the books, that with free speech the people have an opportunity to help abolish bad laws. Its obviously a bad law to place a $500 fine on jaywalking but difficult to draft a constitution that is able to explicitely prohibit all kinds of such bad legislation.
Governments role is not to decide what we are allowed to look at and to control speech. We see the government increasingly doing things it has no business doing, such as invading our privacy and censorship, and engaging in illegal wars, and doing less of what it should be doing and that is helping people who are in need through health care, affordable housing, employment and unemployement insurance, and so on. We need to demand government stop the censorship, the torture, the surveillance to create a prison state to enslave people and start serving the people again and truly protecting peoples freedom, which does not mean censorship torture, and in other ways taking away peoples freedoms and so on.
You are not living in a free society when the government tells you what you can and cannot look it. It is totally arrogant and stupid to assume the only people who want to look at these videos are extremists. I believe in non violence to the core of my soul, and I look at these videos as a research tool to find out about as much as I can about them, so I can best understand what we need to do to stop them. In a democratic society people need to understand the issues, and to be well versed in them, and this is a check to make sure that the government is doing the right thing. If we want a competent government we must scrutinise what the government is doing ourselves and whether they aredoing the right thing. To understand if theyare doing the right thing requires us to be knowledgeable of the problem and therefore be able to access any and all information regarding it. Only then can we know if the governnmet is telling us the truth about things, or if we are being manipulated to support some government agenda which does not really solve the problem but fulfills some other agenda they have, by keeping people ignorant. Often governments use problems in a way to pass through various agendas that really are not aimed at the problem at all or the best way to fix the problem, the solution becomes the end, and the problem becomes the means to the end. 9/11 and the rush to pass the patriot act is an example, governments, it is a textbook practice, use fear to manipulate people into allowing governnemt to expand its power. The government doesnt really care about solving any problems, they only see it as a way to expand their power which is the end goal for them. In any case, we should not let any threat or problem coerce us into giving up our human rights. If we allow us to give up our human rights and our constitutional rights by allowing govement to censor or to invade our privacy, to basically do whatever it wants, to arrest whoever it wants, to torture and so on, is this not terrorism that is causing us to give up our rights. We keep hearing about how terorrists want to take away our freedoms, well if we give up our freedoms, arent we letting the terrorists win? In this case we should ask who is really the terrorists, the government that comes in and exploits peoples fears to expand its own power? Rememeber that power corrupts and power will be abused, which is why Franklin said, though who give up essential liberty for safety will deserve and will get neither. We can have a dictatorship here, and in Nazi germany and in so many other places, the people trusted the government and thought the government was so kind and good and only wanted what was best for them when they gave up their freedoms. Only later when your freedoms are gone and its too late, does it show its true colors, when the death squads emerge and the concentration camps spring up. The risk is simply too great to allow any government police state powers, since you are enabling them to become a much worse enemy to you than whatever they are supposed to protect you against.
I commend youtube for keeping the videos online. As reprehensible as violence is, it is not our right to tell people what they can and cannot look at. perhaps those who are looking at these videos as well, are doing so to research extremism and these groups, for the purpose of better trying to stop their violent activities, than as some sort of inspiration. It is very arrogant to assume that the only people looking at these are other extremists. If we want to stop violence we have to understand those who commit violence. Trying to prohibit understanding of them will actually take us further away from resolving violence. For the same reason that Mein Kampf today is often read by many since it teaches us lessons about the horrors of tyranny and inhumanity, hopefully preventing us from commiting those acts again, so as well do these videos. If we forget the past we are doomed to repeat it, and if we do not acknowledge the present and understand it, we are hopeless to change it for the better
that the US is not a military/police state. My goodness, its becoming more and more blatant all the time thats where it is headed. People shouldnt put up with this crap.
This idea that backwards compatability in Windows or any other OS has hurt its performance is likely ludicrous. Backwards compatability need not affect performance at all, especially of code using new APIs. Usually if there is an older API retained for backwards compatability, the code is often not entered unless some program actually uses that older API. Many OSs implement a backwards compatability with no impact on performance of newer APIs. It can be engineered so it does not effect performance and in fact it is the most logical way to do it.
Backwards compatability also can be important for useability, given that many users have older applications they need to run. One reason Windows has remained dominate is that users dont have to worry about whether a program will run, if it is for an older version of Windows. The inertia of the applications base of older versions is leveraged for newer versions.
Backwards compatability is overall a benefit, rather than a problem and improves useability of an OS.
I would almost think that this author is trying to sabatoge microsoft by eliminating its backwards compatability, something that would damage the OS and further alienate users even further and reduce Microsofts market share.
Not a good argument. For many chinese trapped in china, leaving is not an option. Free speech is a universal and inalienable right of all human beings no matter in which country they live. It is our responsibility, and that of the UN and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,to pressure their government through diplomatic means to make reforms to guarantee, the people free speech and that they will not be punished by the government for what they say.
It seems rather hypocritical for US politicians to criticize censorship in China when they refuse to do anything to stop censorshop right here in the US and often support it. I am referring to the lack of action being taken on net neutrality and prohibuting corporations from censoring the internet. People think that because its a corporation its not a real threat, but it is. These corporations become de facto governments when they can control so many resources, such as major communications infrastructure, these corporations through their policies can have the same effect as government in effectively limiting free speech.This is why ISPs must be common carriers and required to carry all information over them verbatim.
Sometimes it seems the real reason the politicians criticize china is to cover up the fact that they allow censorship right here, and are representatives of the corporations that carry out this censorship. Politicians in the US take campaign donations from corporations, essentially the corporations elect them and they represent the corporations interest. Whoever has the best funding has the best chance of winning so corporations can control elections through who they give donations to. Add to that most of the US media is controlled by a few large corporate conglomerates who basically can filter and conspire to propogandise the ignorant and gullible public. People are not really the ones making the decisions anymore, the process is controlled by corporations and special interests, the american people are brainwashed into thinking they have a choice, when they really do not. You have a media which basically controls most of their information, and can tell them who to vote for, by excluding or including information you can control the available information they have to work with and thus their decision making. The way you make people think they have a choice is by giving them options, but controlling those options. A politicians campaign can easily be destroyed if their funding is withdrawn and the corporation and establishment can weed out those it does not like (like Kucinich, Paul, etc). The media simply ignores them or gives them a fraction of the attention of other preferred candidates.
It seems ironic that the US government is paying so much attention to censorship in other countries when it refuses to prohibit censorship being commited by corporations right here. This law is quite insufficient in protecting freedom of speech. No corporation should be allowed to manipulate content which is transmitted over the internet. Truly ISPs are common carriers and should be required to transmit data verbatim. Corporations can, via owning critical communications infrastructure such as this, become governments by controlling what can be sent over the internet. You cant have this in a truly free society and the US governments inaction to prevent this censorship shows their lack of regard for the peoples freedom.
With the proposed law, the national security exemption is the sort of thing we see as a typical fixture in totalitarian government, The government will have a constitution or a law which claims that the people have free speech rights, to make people think they do, but then in the fine print adds exceptions so vague you could drive a truck through it, like national security, which can be interpreted so loosely it can be applied to nearly anything by a corrupt regime. Many totalitarian governments have a form of this where these rights can be suspended in an emergency, so the government simply declares a perpetual state of emergency. Telling people they have free speech, but only as long as the government approves of it, is not free speech.
To say that Linux is a copy of Unix is absurd. Linux is an original code base not derived from Unix. Linux supports Unix conventions for communication with the kernel and apps, but languages, interfaces, protocols and conventions are not copyrightable. Many OSs have adopted Unix conventions. As well in other domains, outside of kernels, there are numerous other instances where conventions are supported by independant software projects. For instance, one obvious case is web browsers which maintain a standard protocol to communicate with servers. Without these conventions, it would be impossible to use any other than one web browser with one type of server. Browsers instead support a common convention so everything can interoperate. The same with human languages as well. You cannot copyright human languages, only the works that are composed with them. No reasonable person would say that Opera is a copyright violation of some other browser because it supports HTTP and HTML. And the same with Linux.
One often overlooked of human organ harvesting....
on
The Real Body Snatchers
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Something which is not very well known but probably is an instance of one of the largest violation of human rights and illegal harvesting and sale of human body parts, and which are healthy and normal body parts that are being illegally and unethically removed from the bodies of millions of children every year is circumcision. Foreskins, which are a normal and healthy part of the human body and for which there is no justifiable or medically sound and valid rationale for removing a normal and healthy part of the human body that has no medical diseases whatsoever, are harvested from young children, and then are sold to corporations, including pharmacuetical companies, where they are used to manufacture cosmetics and for testing. SkinMedica is one such product which is made from foreskin fibroblasts, and which has been promoted by Oprah Winfrey, who apparently is aware that a major component of the product is human neonatal foreskins stolen from genitally mutilated boys. Ironically, Oprah's show in the past has decried female circumcision. I suppose from Oprah's point of view, the genital mutilation and destruction of parts of boys anatomy is acceptable, this is only unacceptable when done to girls, since apparently only girls deserve to be protected from demeaning, dehumanising genital mutilations, torture and assault. Apparently girls are entitled to more rights to a whole body than boys are.
If a person, as an adult, wants to be circumcised, male or female, they are free to make that choices for themselves, with fully informed consent. it should be the right of the person to make their own choices about removals of normal and undiseased parts of their bodies. It is a basic human right to physical integrity, and unless we uphold a medical standard and universal principle which requires an actual medical abnormality to be present on the part to removed from an unconsenting, this right is not being honoured and respected, and as well, we have no standard to define what is an assault. Any clear assault could be made permissable by society at its own whim, even if it is to the detriment of individual rights. Since circumcision cannot be undone and what is taken cannot be gotten back, the decision should be the person whose body it is, since only they will be able to decide what is best for them. Perhaps some men prefer to remain intact for aesthetic reasons or to retain full sensitivity. We should do what gives the individual the most freedom, since all rights and liberties are based in the individual. Parents do not have a right to do anything to their children and their responsibilities are to protect their children from harm. Children are not extensions of their parents bodies and children do have human rights which are seperate from the parents and are considered seperate, individual persons. Removing or destroying a healthy and undiseased part of a childs body is considered child abuse and it is an assault upon the child by definition , circumcision is a removal of a healthy and undiseased part of the childs body. Removals of parts of the body are permenant and cannot be undone later. A person can always change their beliefs later on, but they cannot undo damage to their body if they did not want this. Therefore, removal of normal parts of human anatomy should be deferred to a time when the person is of the age they can make with fully informed consent these decisions for themselves. The foreskin is a normal and healthy part of the human anatomy and has been a part of the anatomy of mammals and their predecessors for over 100 million years. All mammals have foreskins, including both males and females.
Of course we already know that male or female circumcision is an invalid and wrong genital mutilation of children, since it violates medical ethics. Everyone has a basic human right to a whole body, and to not have parts of their body removed without their consent unless there is a serious, critical, present and current medical condition on that part and where removing it is necessary to treat that medical ab
This sounds like a load of crap to me. As well, many of the problems he cites, such as with malware, viruses, etc, are Windows problems rather than internet problems. If Windows actually had real security features and didnt make running multi-user such an impossible nightmare we wouldnt have nearly as many problems. The last thing the internet needs to be a closed system. I can see, the openness of the internet as it is now, is working fine, and what problems exist are because of Windows, put out by supposed "experts" at Microsoft.
you are totally wrong. First off, when you download all of that content, where are you going to store it? On physical media. It would get very expensive doing so on your HD so, i suppose you would want a disc drive. Blu ray will be very useful for cheap storage of media and data content for such purposes. As well, I do not think that this sudden surge of downloading is going to go over well with ISPs, the internet infrastructure might be a bit to go before it can handle 50 gb downloads of HD movies. Eventually downloading of movies will become more common but even then you will want a physical medium to store it.
Even at close distance the improved resolution is noticeable, so youre wrong. It is worthwhile but not worth $400. I do think that it would be nice to have when prices on the players come down quite a bit. I do agree as well we are a way from digital downloads of movies, maybe for low quality video, but I think there are those who want the higher quality video as well which can take up 50 gb. Even once you gave them downloaded, you will want a disc drive to store the movies on, since having hard drive space for all of those movies would cost a fortune! One of the biggest applications we are overlooking od blu ray is for computer data storage. The format was designed from the beggining with record support so hopefully we will see reasonably priced drives soon.
I do think that the reason for standards has been shown to be important. it has delayed the acceptance of HD disks by years and delayed them becoming more common. I dont think it can be argued that several competing formats is a good thing, you want a choice of players and manufacturers, a format does need to be well designed but there isnt room for many of them in this area.
I also do think HD disks due offer significantly better picture. I have seen both DVD and HD disks and the latter are much better, the difference is noticeable and very obvious to me, and worthwhile. Although this does not mean I am ready to pay $400 for one of these players. I think i would be willing to pay $100, if the players came down in price to that level I think the format would take off. Right now the main thing that is holding it back is price.
Slashdot Mirror
I should add that whenever we change the characteristics of an organism, we change how it interacts with its environment, we run the risk of causing severe environmental problems, as these organisms can reproduce out of control and there is no mechanism to keep it in check. It happens all the time when exotic species are transported to hawaii or australia, where they have no natural predators, when they are introduced to these environments they are quite out of place and can destroy local species. These microbes could have other effects, being genitically engineered, which are heard to predict.Perhaps they will get into rivers and choke out other species. Perhaps they are toxic to other organisms that might consume them. Etc, etc.
This sounds great, but a note of caution is needed. If they have developed a microbe that basically can eat through any organic material, what they perhaps have invented is a new pathogenic superbug. Think about it, if this can eat through organic material as such, what would happen if it got loose somehow and got into a field of crops, could this start eating away and destroying crops? Have you engineered a new super agricultural pest? This could happen completely unintentionally, not to mention the potential for intentional weaponisation.
Ridiculous. It takes energy to do it, and that has to come from somewhere. You end up burning fossil fuels to make hydrogen, and wasting more energy than burning fossul fuels directly.
If it really did allow you to save energy, the car manufacturers would be all over it and environmentalists would be demanding this to be a standard feature in all cars. I mean, getting gas mileage high is a top priority and there is all kinds of research and efforts to make this happen. Car manufacturers would have a big selling point with higher mileage, consumers would flock to it. So why dont these so called inventors licence their technologies to car manufacturers. Because it doesnt work and car manufacturers have actual trained engineers who can see through scam artist crap.
So if it works so great, why arent you still doing it. I have to remain skeptical of fantastic claims like this as well. If this is so, and you can boost up mileage just by adding water to gas, why isnt everyone doing it? It would be a no brainer. Its like all of these miracalous technologies that by retrofitting your car with some device that generates hydrogen from electrolysis and injects it into the fuel, you are supposed to get 80 mpg or some ridiculous thing. You have people selling do it yourself kits for this. if the inventors really did have this, they could make a load of money to sell licences to car manufacturers. They would be billionaries. SO why dont they? Because its not real, its a scam, and any car manufacturer or engine manufacturer would find that out. The reason they only use kits is they cant be held liable when it doesnt work, they can just say the user didnt do something right. They are of course, all get rich quick scams, taking advantage of peoples gullability.
While this may sound like a nice adventure, going into space, if I had a billion, its the last thing I would ever want to do, because it is so risky. There are a million things that can go wrong, space flight has a high rate of occurance of accidents, when you are in orbit, as well, there is not much anyone on ground can do to help you when you get into trouble. So certainly, it is a huge gamble, and not one I would be comfortable with.
This law is a blatant violation of free speech and the first amendment. While I do not agree with "cyberbullying", we are talking about speech here rather than an actual physical act of violence. As well, it is much eisier to ignore verbal abuse on the internet, with block lists, or simply minimising the window, that a law is truly unnecessary. There are a class of crimes called stalking, but on the internet medium these can be fairly easily combated with the ignore lisr etc.
We should not have to live in fear of everything we say perhaps being misconstrued in some wa. That is the kind of society which this will lead to, where people live in fear basically of saying anything.
Usage based pricing is a horrible idea and not much better than discriminatory bandwidth throttling of certain sites. I would much rather have a bandwidth cap which applies to all data regardless of which site than either selective throttling or usage based pricing. ISPs want to advertise far more bandwidth they can offer, in a deceptive practice, and and then compensate for this deceptive advertising with selective throttling and usage based pricing. Either they should be able to provide the bandwidth they advertise or should not advertise it. I would rather see minimum per user bandwidth guarantees, which users would be able to reach, and which can be provided to all users, and then depending on network conditions, users may have additional bandwidth avialable depending on network load (which can be advertised as a maximum rate, during low use periods the amount of bandwidth per user increases). This keeps single users from saturating the network while maintaining flat pricing.
Dennis Kucinich objected to these measures too. The good thing about Kucinich is you get all of Ron Pauls concern about civil liberties and opposition to intrusive police state tactics, without is fanatical ideas about cutting off foreign civilian aid and emergency assistance programs, that you know, keeps children here and in other countries from starving to death.
I think you hit the nail on the head. That is exactly what they want to do. The elites have for so long controlled the media and have been in the exclusive position to be able to propogandise the public and control inforation flow. Since the development of the internet, we have seen for the first time true freedom of speech for the masses, where we dont only have it on paper, but people are actually able to use it without having a lot of money and resources. Previously, media was easy control , and it by definition had to be large corporations in order to reach large numbers of people. Now anyone can publish information that can be accessed by anyone else. This terrifies them, since their goal, being power hungry and really seeing the planet as something to be controlled rather than a place where people can control themselves and live in freedom. They have for years trying to find ways to shut down the internet and control it.
I say nothing should be censored. ISPs are a common carrier and should be prohibited from surveillance and as well as preventing from censoring anything they are carrying, just as the postal service cannot open your letters and censor them. This does not mean we give the power to the government corporations or to anyone else as to what can be censored, we need to deny the government and corporations the right to censor anything.
I would like to clarify my message a bit. When I said rich elite I was referring to certain wealthy or powerful corporations and individuals who want to control everything. I do not mean to say all wealthy are like that, some do have good intentions and have tried to do positive things, one example is Google and their attempts to keep the 700 Mhz spectrum open.
We need to have a government that that respects the freedoms and rights of everyone, not disporportionally that of some rather than others. Obama will make our priorities once again making this country better for everyone, investing in its infrastructure, in science and education, and so on, rather than getting our resources tied up in oil wars that benefit of a few wealthy corporate sponsors of Bush. We need to fund science and education so we can have the capability to develop renewable and clean sources of energy to power the future. Drilling for oil isnt the long term solution to that, and is so environmentally harmful, along with oil, we need to stop using it as quickly as possible and find a clean green source of abundant energy. This is essential for maintaining our computer tech inertia which is also energy dependant. Obama seems when it comes to energy issues and the internet seems to have a good understanding of what we need to do and should not do.
Net Neutrality is very important and critical to preserving a free and open internet and we do badly need to make this a part of law. Barack Obama is more likely to do this. I am definitely a Obama supporter not only due to this but due to a wide spectrum of other issues as well.
The claims made by telcos are mostly lies and deception. The telcos always have been able to tier service based on overall speed, what they have not been allowed to do is effectively censor content by slowing down some sites or blocking access to them. They dont need any capability to censor content or to discriminate against certain content. The corporations agenda is simply a vieled attempt to control information flow over the internet and to block access to things they dont like and dont agree with.
Measures lesser than Net Nuetrality wont be enough to address this. Blocking access or making access more difficult to certain content is innately bad and has no place on what should be an open and democratic form of communication where everyone has equal opportunity to be heard, where things are not biased towards corporations and their content. There is no way to make discriminating against content an acceptable practice or tilting it in favour of powerful corporate interests.
It is little different from what is being done in china, It is different in name only, here we have corporations do the censorship, In china it is government, The US has a composite government consisting of corporations and the republican government which they elect and which represents their interests. The corporations are the republican constituents. When you here a republican talk about their constituents, they are usually referring to the wealthy corporate donors who got them elected and paid for their campaigns. Democrats while not always perfect are certainly have a greater propensity to represent the people and do what is in the best interests of the general population rather than of big corporations.
We complain about what China has done in censoring the internet however we would have the same situation here unless we do something to bolster the internet as a free and open medium where everyone which is open to everyone with no discrimination. The same sort of mentality and insidious objective behinds Chinas censorship and the desire of corporations to censor the internet springs from the same mindset. The corporations have been able to control the flow of information for so long, they have had a monopoly on the media and were the gatekeepers, they could control what people could see and hear and it was very difficult to reach a large number of people, very expensive, though traditional mediums, so it excluded many from being able to express their views. the internet is a democratic form of communication, it is the first time we have had anything approaching true positive free speech where anyone could broadcast their views to anyone else and everyone is on an equal footing, no matter if you are poor or are a millionaire. And if a you re a rich megalomaniac you just cant have a situation where the little people can express themselves and actually make their voice heard to millions, and where there is nothing you can do to stop this and where they basically are on an equally footing, yhou no longer have your built in advantage of traditional media which allows you to more effectively distribute your views. Thje rich hate this because they have been so long accustomed to setting the agenda and manipulating society for their own benefit. So the openness and democracy of the net scared them because they are losing power and the internet has moved us more in the direction of a democratic society, so they are now trying to find a way to desperately shut it down and turn it into some sort of corporate controlled outlet one way sort of medium just like television is, where only the corporations have any rights to express themselves and everyone else is a mindless consumer who pays their monthly satellite subscription bill to be brainwashed by c
I am deeply disturbed that the US government is censoring information. This shows that the US government is now operating in total defiance of the US constitution and of human rights, along with the fact it is now engaging in torture of prisoners and indefinite detainments without trail and charges and so on. No government should be allowed to censor information or violate human rights in other ways. We should not allow a government to decide what people can and cant look at. Once we allow this, there is little stop this from getting more and more unreasonable. One minute it could be terrorist videos, another minute it could be videos say uncovering toxic pollution of the environment by a company (this, according to the increasingly vague definition of terrorism, I am sure could eventually be called a terrorist act because it threatens corporate profits and tries to alert the public so they will demand the government stop the pollution).
Free speech is a very important right and why the drafters of the US constitution did not include any provision for it to be suspended. This is because it is difficult to define what is bad law or a good law in a constitution. The founders understood that if there are unjust laws in the books, that with free speech the people have an opportunity to help abolish bad laws. Its obviously a bad law to place a $500 fine on jaywalking but difficult to draft a constitution that is able to explicitely prohibit all kinds of such bad legislation.
Governments role is not to decide what we are allowed to look at and to control speech. We see the government increasingly doing things it has no business doing, such as invading our privacy and censorship, and engaging in illegal wars, and doing less of what it should be doing and that is helping people who are in need through health care, affordable housing, employment and unemployement insurance, and so on. We need to demand government stop the censorship, the torture, the surveillance to create a prison state to enslave people and start serving the people again and truly protecting peoples freedom, which does not mean censorship torture, and in other ways taking away peoples freedoms and so on.
You are not living in a free society when the government tells you what you can and cannot look it. It is totally arrogant and stupid to assume the only people who want to look at these videos are extremists. I believe in non violence to the core of my soul, and I look at these videos as a research tool to find out about as much as I can about them, so I can best understand what we need to do to stop them. In a democratic society people need to understand the issues, and to be well versed in them, and this is a check to make sure that the government is doing the right thing. If we want a competent government we must scrutinise what the government is doing ourselves and whether they aredoing the right thing. To understand if theyare doing the right thing requires us to be knowledgeable of the problem and therefore be able to access any and all information regarding it. Only then can we know if the governnmet is telling us the truth about things, or if we are being manipulated to support some government agenda which does not really solve the problem but fulfills some other agenda they have, by keeping people ignorant. Often governments use problems in a way to pass through various agendas that really are not aimed at the problem at all or the best way to fix the problem, the solution becomes the end, and the problem becomes the means to the end. 9/11 and the rush to pass the patriot act is an example, governments, it is a textbook practice, use fear to manipulate people into allowing governnemt to expand its power. The government doesnt really care about solving any problems, they only see it as a way to expand their power which is the end goal for them. In any case, we should not let any threat or problem coerce us into giving up our human rights. If we allow us to give up our human rights and our constitutional rights by allowing govement to censor or to invade our privacy, to basically do whatever it wants, to arrest whoever it wants, to torture and so on, is this not terrorism that is causing us to give up our rights. We keep hearing about how terorrists want to take away our freedoms, well if we give up our freedoms, arent we letting the terrorists win? In this case we should ask who is really the terrorists, the government that comes in and exploits peoples fears to expand its own power? Rememeber that power corrupts and power will be abused, which is why Franklin said, though who give up essential liberty for safety will deserve and will get neither. We can have a dictatorship here, and in Nazi germany and in so many other places, the people trusted the government and thought the government was so kind and good and only wanted what was best for them when they gave up their freedoms. Only later when your freedoms are gone and its too late, does it show its true colors, when the death squads emerge and the concentration camps spring up. The risk is simply too great to allow any government police state powers, since you are enabling them to become a much worse enemy to you than whatever they are supposed to protect you against.
I commend youtube for keeping the videos online. As reprehensible as violence is, it is not our right to tell people what they can and cannot look at. perhaps those who are looking at these videos as well, are doing so to research extremism and these groups, for the purpose of better trying to stop their violent activities, than as some sort of inspiration. It is very arrogant to assume that the only people looking at these are other extremists. If we want to stop violence we have to understand those who commit violence. Trying to prohibit understanding of them will actually take us further away from resolving violence. For the same reason that Mein Kampf today is often read by many since it teaches us lessons about the horrors of tyranny and inhumanity, hopefully preventing us from commiting those acts again, so as well do these videos. If we forget the past we are doomed to repeat it, and if we do not acknowledge the present and understand it, we are hopeless to change it for the better
that the US is not a military/police state. My goodness, its becoming more and more blatant all the time thats where it is headed. People shouldnt put up with this crap.
This idea that backwards compatability in Windows or any other OS has hurt its performance is likely ludicrous. Backwards compatability need not affect performance at all, especially of code using new APIs. Usually if there is an older API retained for backwards compatability, the code is often not entered unless some program actually uses that older API. Many OSs implement a backwards compatability with no impact on performance of newer APIs. It can be engineered so it does not effect performance and in fact it is the most logical way to do it.
Backwards compatability also can be important for useability, given that many users have older applications they need to run. One reason Windows has remained dominate is that users dont have to worry about whether a program will run, if it is for an older version of Windows. The inertia of the applications base of older versions is leveraged for newer versions.
Backwards compatability is overall a benefit, rather than a problem and improves useability of an OS.
I would almost think that this author is trying to sabatoge microsoft by eliminating its backwards compatability, something that would damage the OS and further alienate users even further and reduce Microsofts market share.
Not a good argument. For many chinese trapped in china, leaving is not an option. Free speech is a universal and inalienable right of all human beings no matter in which country they live. It is our responsibility, and that of the UN and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,to pressure their government through diplomatic means to make reforms to guarantee, the people free speech and that they will not be punished by the government for what they say.
It seems rather hypocritical for US politicians to criticize censorship in China when they refuse to do anything to stop censorshop right here in the US and often support it. I am referring to the lack of action being taken on net neutrality and prohibuting corporations from censoring the internet. People think that because its a corporation its not a real threat, but it is. These corporations become de facto governments when they can control so many resources, such as major communications infrastructure, these corporations through their policies can have the same effect as government in effectively limiting free speech.This is why ISPs must be common carriers and required to carry all information over them verbatim.
Sometimes it seems the real reason the politicians criticize china is to cover up the fact that they allow censorship right here, and are representatives of the corporations that carry out this censorship. Politicians in the US take campaign donations from corporations, essentially the corporations elect them and they represent the corporations interest. Whoever has the best funding has the best chance of winning so corporations can control elections through who they give donations to. Add to that most of the US media is controlled by a few large corporate conglomerates who basically can filter and conspire to propogandise the ignorant and gullible public. People are not really the ones making the decisions anymore, the process is controlled by corporations and special interests, the american people are brainwashed into thinking they have a choice, when they really do not. You have a media which basically controls most of their information, and can tell them who to vote for, by excluding or including information you can control the available information they have to work with and thus their decision making. The way you make people think they have a choice is by giving them options, but controlling those options. A politicians campaign can easily be destroyed if their funding is withdrawn and the corporation and establishment can weed out those it does not like (like Kucinich, Paul, etc). The media simply ignores them or gives them a fraction of the attention of other preferred candidates.
It seems ironic that the US government is paying so much attention to censorship in other countries when it refuses to prohibit censorship being commited by corporations right here. This law is quite insufficient in protecting freedom of speech. No corporation should be allowed to manipulate content which is transmitted over the internet. Truly ISPs are common carriers and should be required to transmit data verbatim. Corporations can, via owning critical communications infrastructure such as this, become governments by controlling what can be sent over the internet. You cant have this in a truly free society and the US governments inaction to prevent this censorship shows their lack of regard for the peoples freedom.
With the proposed law, the national security exemption is the sort of thing we see as a typical fixture in totalitarian government, The government will have a constitution or a law which claims that the people have free speech rights, to make people think they do, but then in the fine print adds exceptions so vague you could drive a truck through it, like national security, which can be interpreted so loosely it can be applied to nearly anything by a corrupt regime. Many totalitarian governments have a form of this where these rights can be suspended in an emergency, so the government simply declares a perpetual state of emergency. Telling people they have free speech, but only as long as the government approves of it, is not free speech.
To say that Linux is a copy of Unix is absurd. Linux is an original code base not derived from Unix. Linux supports Unix conventions for communication with the kernel and apps, but languages, interfaces, protocols and conventions are not copyrightable. Many OSs have adopted Unix conventions. As well in other domains, outside of kernels, there are numerous other instances where conventions are supported by independant software projects. For instance, one obvious case is web browsers which maintain a standard protocol to communicate with servers. Without these conventions, it would be impossible to use any other than one web browser with one type of server. Browsers instead support a common convention so everything can interoperate. The same with human languages as well. You cannot copyright human languages, only the works that are composed with them. No reasonable person would say that Opera is a copyright violation of some other browser because it supports HTTP and HTML. And the same with Linux.
Something which is not very well known but probably is an instance of one of the largest violation of human rights and illegal harvesting and sale of human body parts, and which are healthy and normal body parts that are being illegally and unethically removed from the bodies of millions of children every year is circumcision. Foreskins, which are a normal and healthy part of the human body and for which there is no justifiable or medically sound and valid rationale for removing a normal and healthy part of the human body that has no medical diseases whatsoever, are harvested from young children, and then are sold to corporations, including pharmacuetical companies, where they are used to manufacture cosmetics and for testing. SkinMedica is one such product which is made from foreskin fibroblasts, and which has been promoted by Oprah Winfrey, who apparently is aware that a major component of the product is human neonatal foreskins stolen from genitally mutilated boys. Ironically, Oprah's show in the past has decried female circumcision. I suppose from Oprah's point of view, the genital mutilation and destruction of parts of boys anatomy is acceptable, this is only unacceptable when done to girls, since apparently only girls deserve to be protected from demeaning, dehumanising genital mutilations, torture and assault. Apparently girls are entitled to more rights to a whole body than boys are.
If a person, as an adult, wants to be circumcised, male or female, they are free to make that choices for themselves, with fully informed consent. it should be the right of the person to make their own choices about removals of normal and undiseased parts of their bodies. It is a basic human right to physical integrity, and unless we uphold a medical standard and universal principle which requires an actual medical abnormality to be present on the part to removed from an unconsenting, this right is not being honoured and respected, and as well, we have no standard to define what is an assault. Any clear assault could be made permissable by society at its own whim, even if it is to the detriment of individual rights. Since circumcision cannot be undone and what is taken cannot be gotten back, the decision should be the person whose body it is, since only they will be able to decide what is best for them. Perhaps some men prefer to remain intact for aesthetic reasons or to retain full sensitivity. We should do what gives the individual the most freedom, since all rights and liberties are based in the individual. Parents do not have a right to do anything to their children and their responsibilities are to protect their children from harm. Children are not extensions of their parents bodies and children do have human rights which are seperate from the parents and are considered seperate, individual persons. Removing or destroying a healthy and undiseased part of a childs body is considered child abuse and it is an assault upon the child by definition , circumcision is a removal of a healthy and undiseased part of the childs body. Removals of parts of the body are permenant and cannot be undone later. A person can always change their beliefs later on, but they cannot undo damage to their body if they did not want this. Therefore, removal of normal parts of human anatomy should be deferred to a time when the person is of the age they can make with fully informed consent these decisions for themselves. The foreskin is a normal and healthy part of the human anatomy and has been a part of the anatomy of mammals and their predecessors for over 100 million years. All mammals have foreskins, including both males and females.
Of course we already know that male or female circumcision is an invalid and wrong genital mutilation of children, since it violates medical ethics. Everyone has a basic human right to a whole body, and to not have parts of their body removed without their consent unless there is a serious, critical, present and current medical condition on that part and where removing it is necessary to treat that medical ab
This sounds like a load of crap to me. As well, many of the problems he cites, such as with malware, viruses, etc, are Windows problems rather than internet problems. If Windows actually had real security features and didnt make running multi-user such an impossible nightmare we wouldnt have nearly as many problems. The last thing the internet needs to be a closed system. I can see, the openness of the internet as it is now, is working fine, and what problems exist are because of Windows, put out by supposed "experts" at Microsoft.
you are totally wrong. First off, when you download all of that content, where are you going to store it? On physical media. It would get very expensive doing so on your HD so, i suppose you would want a disc drive. Blu ray will be very useful for cheap storage of media and data content for such purposes. As well, I do not think that this sudden surge of downloading is going to go over well with ISPs, the internet infrastructure might be a bit to go before it can handle 50 gb downloads of HD movies. Eventually downloading of movies will become more common but even then you will want a physical medium to store it.
Even at close distance the improved resolution is noticeable, so youre wrong. It is worthwhile but not worth $400. I do think that it would be nice to have when prices on the players come down quite a bit. I do agree as well we are a way from digital downloads of movies, maybe for low quality video, but I think there are those who want the higher quality video as well which can take up 50 gb. Even once you gave them downloaded, you will want a disc drive to store the movies on, since having hard drive space for all of those movies would cost a fortune! One of the biggest applications we are overlooking od blu ray is for computer data storage. The format was designed from the beggining with record support so hopefully we will see reasonably priced drives soon.
I do think that the reason for standards has been shown to be important. it has delayed the acceptance of HD disks by years and delayed them becoming more common. I dont think it can be argued that several competing formats is a good thing, you want a choice of players and manufacturers, a format does need to be well designed but there isnt room for many of them in this area.
I also do think HD disks due offer significantly better picture. I have seen both DVD and HD disks and the latter are much better, the difference is noticeable and very obvious to me, and worthwhile. Although this does not mean I am ready to pay $400 for one of these players. I think i would be willing to pay $100, if the players came down in price to that level I think the format would take off. Right now the main thing that is holding it back is price.